Soylent solution: Will this distasteful but nutritionally complete food make your kitchen obsolete?

As we begin a new year, the National Post takes a five-part look at the future technologies that are coming sooner than we think. They’re still not flying cars (unfortunately), but these innovations can and likely will transform how we eat, what we wear, how we heal and even how we indulge in vice.

In her 1942 book on wartime gastronomy, How to Cook a Wolf, the great American food writer M.F.K. Fisher offered a recipe for “Sludge,” a boiled slurry of vegetables, grains and meat that will taste awful, but nourish for pennies a day.

“It is functional, really: a streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money,” she wrote.

Seven decades later, a sort of Sludge 2.0 is going viral under the name Soylent. After the revolutions of organic, slow food and molecular gastronomy, its adherents are gleefully predicting the end of food, at least proper food.

With $2-million in pre-orders, and nearly that in venture capital, a young entrepreneur in California is set within weeks to ship the first batches of Soylent, a powdered drink marketed as a total food replacement for people, such as hard core computer programmers, for whom real food is a costly hassle, just as it was for wartime housewives.

Reaction has been polarized, even before anyone has tasted the mixture of rice protein, oat flour, olive oil and various additives, from iodine to molybdenum, so nutritionally complete in theory that you could eat nothing else forever. As such, Soylent is either a gruesomely distasteful way to enable the eating disorders of young male computer geeks, no better morally than if it were marketed to anorexic girls. Or it is a technological liberation from a broken gastronomical culture, where the only things readily available are deep-fried or previously frozen, and proper cooking is inefficient, slow, expensive, and begging for scientific revolution.

“I’m not a very good cook,” said Rob Rhinehart, 25, the computer science grad inventor of Soylent, who has freely shared the long list of ingredients — including some that are not farmed but rather mined or synthesized — to promote do-it-yourself adjustments based on individual needs and preferences. “I just thought, what if you could get the same effect [as food] with something that is very simple and very easy.”

The project fits into a dynamic of two competing trends that will affect how people will eat this year, and into the future.

One is evident in recent breakthroughs like fake hamburger grown in a petri dish, apples that do not go brown, and rice tweaked genetically to deliver more vitamins. Heavily technological, it is a trend that encompasses sous vide baths, induction stoves, chemicals for turning liquids into pearls, and at the extreme, Soylent.

The other is of organic authenticity, scavenged produce, heirloom fruit, earthenware pots over wood fires, and nose-to-tail butchery.

In today’s food culture, it is progressives versus regressives, science fiction dorks versus faux nostalgic hipsters. In terms of superstar chefs, this conflict is essentially Ferran Adrià (whose elBulli in Spain pioneered molecular gastronomy) versus René Redzepi (whose Noma in Copenhagen was ranked the best in the world for a menu of scavenged local produce prepared like the finest luxury meat.)

At the heart of the dispute is the idea of the perfect meal, the universal diet, the golden formula. Soylent aims at this, using the modern technique of crowdsourcing to adjust its lengthy ingredient list toward perfection, just as the ancients figured out the trick of pairing a cereal with a legume, and saw the idea spread around the world, as rise e bisi, beans on toast, the peanut butter sandwich.

“It’s a huge experiment really, and I think there are many risks,” said Berna Magnuson, associate professor of nutritional science at the University of Toronto. “The rationale for their choice of ingredients is quite worrisome.”

Science deals in perfect abstractions, governed by discernible rules. Food is not like that. Baking can be, but real cooking — shop, chop and cook, adjust to taste, serve with grace, eat with gusto — is a more human enterprise. Isolated from food, as in Soylent, nutrients do not have the same biological effects, said Prof. Magnuson, who is also associate editor of the journal Food Science & Nutrition. A banana is not worth just a measure of potassium. Viewing food as the sum of its chemical parts — in pills or powder — is what the Jetsons did, and they got everything wrong.

‘This is hilarious, this is exactly how we make animal feed’

There is no golden formula of nutrition, Prof. Magnuson said, and Soylent’s quest is vain, at least given what we currently know about nutrition and health. Like consciousness, it might be an uncrackable code, with no magical solution, crowdsourced or otherwise.

“And I think it’s sad, very sad, that people are looking for it,” she said. “I was saying to my husband, this is hilarious, this is exactly how we make animal feed.”

She means they both try to meet guidelines with the cheapest raw material the market offers, in the “wild wild west” American regulatory environment of dietary supplements.

“But even the animal scientists are doing a better job than these guys,” she said. “Not one of them on their group has any nutritional education.”

The mark of the nerd is a fetish for science paired with a blindness to esthetics. So it is with Soylent. Many commenters have noted its physical similarity to semen. Its taste has been compared to Play-Doh, yeasty, or “like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass.”

Soylent is kosher, halal and vegan, but it is not designed to be appetizing. Good taste or pleasing texture would not even be the point. Soylent could taste like mother’s milk to a baby and it would still not be food, not real food anyway. Mr. Rhinehart said Soylent is a food, and an important one, but as a person’s only food, it is what is ominously known as a biohack. Food, in this scenario, is the problem, not the solution. Soylent is nutrition, solved.

In the Larousse Gastronomique, the leading culinary reference book, food is defined as “a substance eaten to sustain life; as part of a well-balanced diet, it promotes growth and maintains health. No one food is nutritionally perfect as it does not supply all the nutrients in the right proportions to support health…”

This is the supposed problem Mr. Rhinehart intends to solve with a mail-order powder, that he said one day might even flow from kitchen taps, though the kitchen would be obsolete.

“I use traditional food to supplement my overall happiness … because it’s fun, not because I need it,” he said. Before Soylent, he was eating fast food and ramen noodles. Then he started surviving on Soylent, and went a month this year with nothing else. “I just basically realized what the people who were really into health were talking about,” he said.

Now he eats two or three normal meals a week, for fun and friendship, not food.

Soylent sells at less than $10 a day for 2,200 calories, with the price likely to fall, and he hopes to offer it within a year in Canada, pending regulatory approval. It could be a hell of a bargain.

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